I have been thinking about the Tau quite a bit and their role in the tournament. I don't think a Tau army took any of the top three spots, even though there was quite a bit of Tau out there. Steinerp did a good job doing the codex demographics over on his blog Aspects of the Void. Check it out.
Other than the legion of Riptides (I battled ten of them over the course of four opponents *sigh*) the running constant for the Tau was the buff commander suit. That little fellow was in all four lists doing about the exact same thing. Either joined to Riptides or Dark Reapers. Sprinkle in some Sky Rays and maybe a dash of Kroot and you had the basic core list everyone seemed to be running. Got kinda boring after awhile. So it would seem that slightly tailoring a list in order to just kill that bugger would do loads to help destroy these kinds of lists. Usually the whole thing was built around the one combo and the amount of damage it could do. I don't think that is a particularly sound plan for a six round tournament. Looks like the standings agree with me.
Also, I expected a ton of "Wave Serpent Spam" lists, as people tend to say with varying degrees of vitriol. As far as I know, I had the most Serpents at five. Strangely, there weren't even that many with four. Perhaps the actual spam version of that flavor of Eldar finally made its weaknesses apparent enough.
I have also decided to mostly retire my mechanized Eldar list from regular play. I will still probably take it to tournaments until I get a new one honed enough that I think I have a chance at winning with it. My new list won't have any Wave Serpents in it. Largely, because Wave Serpents have pretty much ruined my play experience. I've been heavily into mech-dar for a long time now, and I won a lot of games when Wave Serpents were considered to be over costed and sub par. Now that they are awesome, I look like "that guy", I see the fun drain out of my opponents' faces about turn 2 or 3, and I sound like everyone else running net lists throwing the caveat that they "have always played this list". So now I am on a quest to make a new killer tournament list that doesn't utilize a composition similar to what people expect tournament Eldar to look like.
Sounds like fun to me.
And as a last note, I want to say congratulations to the staff of the GT, it was a great event. There were a few hiccups which were to be expected for a first year event, but overall it was a ton of fun and I can't wait for next year.
